In today’s hyper-competitive job economy, attracting the best talent requires a proactive approach toward building meaningful relationships with candidates earlier in the recruiting process. The best companies understand their role in creating a positive candidate experience for potential hires, and the broader impact their behavior has on their company’s brand and ability to recruit top talent.
What is Candidate Engagement?
Candidates start to form an opinion about your company, both as a future employer and as a business the moment they begin the job seeking process. Candidate engagement is the experience candidates have with your company during every touch point of the recruiting and hiring process. Recruiting strategies targeted toward improving candidate engagement, often involve building an authentic relationship with candidates earlier in the process.
According to a study done by CareerBuilder, 80% of candidates use the hiring process to determine how a company will treat its employees and 50% of candidates say they wouldn’t work for a company with a bad reputation – even for a pay increase. (TalentNow). With the proliferation of social media and job boards, a negative recruiting experience can spread like wildfire with a simple click of a button.
Today’s candidates don’t have time to waste with a prospective employer who takes too long to hire, doesn’t communicate effectively, or that gives a disorganized first impression. Employment rates are at an all-time low, empowering top candidates to selectively choose the companies they wish to work with, not vise versa.
In this blog post, we’ll cover the six strategies to help you improve your candidate engagement and attract top talent:
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Show Candidates You Are a Great Employer to Work For
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Leverage Your Current Employees
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Follow up with candidates quickly
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Be transparent and automate where you can
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Create an engaging pre-assessment process
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Use two-way video interviewing technology
1. Show Candidates You Are a Great Employer to Work For
A positive employer brand communicates that your company is a great place to work. Showing potential candidates what it’s actually like to work for your company is an effective way to get them excited before the application process even begins. Get candidates engaged and excited about working for you by sharing employee testimonials, messages from company leaders on your website or blog, ways your company gives back to its community, and images showcasing work-related events.
Need some inspiration? Here are five company career pages and talent communities that are turning their recruiting efforts into branding opportunities with prospective candidates.
2. Leverage Your Current Employees
Candidates trust a company's current employees way more than their corporate messaging to provide credible information on what it’s like to work there. Prospective hires want to connect authentically through your strongest brand ambassadors: your current employees.
And who better to speak about expectations, a day in the life, and your company’s mission and culture than those who are living and breathing it every day?
Some companies do a great job leveraging their employees to authentically share their employer brand to the right people, at the right time. The best ones do this to create a powerful recruiting strategy. Take Under Armour for example. The Under Armour University Recruiting team went from interacting with 20 colleges and universities to over 200, by leveraging their current employees and technology. Learn more on how Under Armour is scaling their recruiting efforts.
3. Follow up with candidates quickly
According to research by the Talent Board, candidates are 52% more likely to refer a company to others, apply again, and make purchases as a customer if they receive job-related feedback the same day as their interview.
Instead of leaving candidates hanging and hoping that they will wait for your company to get back in contact, aim to give same-day feedback. Let them know that you are genuinely interested in hiring them, and explain what obstacles (if any) are standing in your way toward a final decision.
Whether you offer a candidate the job or not, provide them with feedback about the experience. What would they need to work on to get hired with your company? What did you like about the way they approached you?
How you treat job candidates (the ones you hire and the ones you do not) broadcasts a clear message about your values and company culture. By offering honest and timely feedback, you'll improve candidate engagement and increase the odds that they will consider their experience with your brand a positive one.
4. Be transparent and automate where you can
Do you notice that candidates come in with many of the same questions, interview after interview? Most candidates will do research on your company long before they arrive for an interview, but some of the answers they want most may not be readily accessible.
Find ways to make the recruiting and interview process more transparent to prospective candidates. For example, you can put up a chatbot on your website or provide candidates special access to a specific corner of the company website that will answer many of their key questions about the company via an FAQ. Being transparent from the onset helps put candidates at ease and sets the stage for a positive experience with your brand.
5. Create an engaging pre-assessment process
Manually screening all of your candidates is virtually impossible—especially if you’re a larger company that experiences a high-volume of interest. Online assessment tools make the hiring process easier, more productive, and even more enjoyable. They provide you as the employer, with valuable information about your candidate and the candidate an opportunity to learn what is unique or important to the company.
Assessment tools range from broad personality tests to aptitude tests. Here are some of the most popular assessment tools on the market:
- HackerRank
HackerRank allows companies an opportunity to use coding assessments in over 35 programming languages. - Koru
Koru offers companies a 20-minute online assessment they can use to get a read on where candidates rank on seven key soft skills: grit, ownership, curiosity, polish, teamwork, rigor, and impact. - Predictive Index
The Predictive Index helps companies better understand what drives workplace behavior and to strategize about how to harness that learning. - Pymetrics
Pymetrics offers games that can be used to assess soft skills, measuring 90 cognitive and emotional traits. The Pymetrics tool measures a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses and uses algorithms to benchmark them against a company’s top performers.
By utilizing engaging pre-selection opportunities, you’ll keep the recruiting process both interactive and manageable.
6. Use two-way video interviewing technology
80% of candidates would take one job over another based on personal relationships formed during the interview process. What better way to nurture your top talent than through engaging interview opportunities like two-way video interviewing?
With the help of video, you can form a more authentic relationship with candidates that meets them where they already are: online. Because these video chats can happen anywhere, you’ll simultaneously reduce the scheduling burdens placed on both your employees and prospects
Science has proven that virtual connection can be just as powerful and impactful on the human mind as an in-person encounter. Using live, one-on-one video and a candidate-forward approach, Turazo is helping top companies reach more candidates, reduce travel costs and time out of the office, and connect with their prospects in more meaningful ways.
Wrapping Up
Keeping candidates engaged throughout the job search process can be challenging, but is key to achieving your hiring goals. A dynamic and engaging recruiting experience will differentiate your company from your competitors, and ensure that you land high quality candidates, faster. Try these six candidate engagement strategies to better engage your potential candidates, learn more about them, and attract the ones that are most likely to be a good fit for your organization.
